Thursday, May 31, 2012

Dyeing by the Lock

All those white locks looked pretty boring to me so I just had to add some color to them. I did not want to spend months spinning only white again. Been there. Done that. Over it.

I wanted them to be a pale pink but I had to worry about how to add the color without disturbing the locks.
I gave them a dunk in some very diluted Jacquard Fire Red dye and then piled them up on trays that I could microwave. The Mister's love of Chinese food keeps us well stocked in these plastic containers. I used the lids.

I stacked all the trays on top of each other and them put them all in one zip lock bag and gave them a 20 minute steaming of 2 minutes on and 2 minutes of rest.

The dyeing worked very well but I still have no idea if they are actually clean enough to spin. The sun has to do its job for a few days before I'll know if all this work was worth it.

5 comments:

About how many ounces of wool is that? It doesn't look like quite enough for all of that work...but photos can be deceiving so I thought I would ask. Will it be enough for a pair of socks or a hat or will you just end up dyeing more as you need it? Very curious about this process!

This ended up to be only about 40 grams of wool. There is also lots of waste when you comb out Cormo so I will have even less. This was only an experiment to see if it was worthwhile to do since washing Cormo is a nightmare. One day, I will take the remainder and finish washing and dyeing it this way as it did dry beautifully (post to come). I wish I had done this with my really nice Cormo locks as I pretty much ruined them. Next year, I will pick up more Cormo at the MDSW since, although it is tedious, this is a very good way to wash it. The resulting yarn is like heaven!

Out of curiosity, I just went through this whole process again. It took me less than an hour to wash and dye another 40 grams. I could easily have done more if I were not dyeing in the microwave. I could do a shawl's worth in a few days at this rate. It was much less tedious this time. Dunk, soap, rinse, rinse, dye. Done!